American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

For Hubert Harrison, it was bad enough to have poverty (the result of an exploitative capitalist system) put a lock on your mind, but it was even worse to have your own religion do it. This was, in his view, the most powerful insight Nietzsche’s genealogy of the slave morality offered to African Americans. Nietzsche helped him see that African Americans especially should liberate themselves from the “dubious blessings of Christianity,” and breathe the larger air of “Freethought.” He believed, however, that they were the least likely to do so because “the church saw to it that [Christianity] taught to slaves should stress the servile virtues of subservience and content[ment], and these things have bitten deeply into the souls of black folk.” Making matters worse, Harrison argued, the chastened, meek sensibility of Christianity created a timid intellectual “conservatism in [n]egroes.” Nietzsche’s “slave morality” thus revealed a slave mentality in the African Americans’“sphere of ideas” : Nietzsche’s contention that the ethics of Christianity are the slave’s ethics would seem to be justified in this instance. Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains … content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction. The present condition of the Negroes of America is a touching bit of testimony to the truth of this assertion. It was Nietzsche who helped Harrison explain how Christianity for Afr...